Chapter 2: Poison & Champagne (3)

She tells herself it's the stress. She tells herself the Series A is eating him. She's twenty, and in love, and she chooses to believe the kinder explanation.

She has no idea he's choosing to let her.

One evening, she catches a fragment through the closed door of his study. Kane's voice, low and even, the voice he uses for people he doesn't want to owe anything: "No. The girl is not a negotiation. She's not on the table."

A pause. Then: "I don't care what the old families want. She stays out of it. That's final."

Lila stands in the hallway with her hand on the doorknob and her heart doing something slow and cold. She knows she shouldn't ask. She's been practicing not asking for weeks. But she opens the door anyway.

"Who was that?"

Kane looks up. The mask comes down so fast she almost misses it—the smooth, tired smile, the way he sets the phone down like it was nothing. "Old family business. Some people think they own everything. They like to remind you."

"Kane. Who?"

He comes around the desk and takes her face in his hands, the way he does, and kisses her forehead. "Nobody you ever need to meet. Trust me, Lil."

She wants to push. She can feel the question building, huge and hot, behind her teeth: then why are you taking your phone into the bathroom, why do you look at me like I'm a clock, why does it sound like you're protecting me from something you won't name.

She swallows it. Trust, she tells herself, is a choice. She's choosing.

She doesn't see him, after she's gone back to the bedroom, standing in the study with his fist pressed against the window, knuckles white, whispering to the glass: "I'm going to get you out of their sight, Lil. That's the only way they stop seeing you."

He thinks of it, even then, as a rescue.

⁂

Late one night, looking for a book he promised to lend her, Lila opens the wrong drawer in his study.

Under a folder of board meeting minutes, there is half a page.

It's printed, formal, the kind of document that has numbered clauses. Agreement on the Dissolution of the Relationship… Party A… Party B… Compensation: none.

The word none is the loudest word she has ever seen in print.

She reads it twice. She reads the Compensation: none a third time. Then she folds the paper, puts it back exactly where she found it, and walks out of the study on legs that have gone numb.

She stands in the doorway of the living room and waits for him to come home. She waits two hours. She doesn't cry. She's not the crying kind, not yet.

Kane walks in at 1 a.m., sees her standing there with the folded half page held out in her hand, and his pupils shrink like a man who's been shot.

"What is this?" Her voice is perfectly calm. She's proud of it.

He is quiet for so long she thinks he might finally, finally explain. Then he reaches out, takes the paper from her hand, and burns it in front of her with his own lighter.

The flame eats the clause about compensation. The ash falls between them, and neither of them moves.

"Someone wants you gone from my life." He pulls her into his arms, hard enough to hurt. "Lila. Trust me."

She stands stiff in his arms for a long moment. Some part of her—the part that's been counting the silences, the three visits he hasn't mentioned, the phone calls he takes in the other room—is screaming. The rest of her is twenty years old and in love, and love is a coward when it has to be.

Slowly, she lifts her hands and holds him back.

She doesn't tell him she's already written the London reply, three drafts, sitting in her drafts folder. She doesn't tell him she's decided she'll never send them. Trust, she decides, is a choice. She's choosing.

⁂

That night, the bathroom fills with steam.

He presses her against the cold tile, hot water running down both of them, and his mouth finds her throat and stays there, trust me, trust me, trust me pressed into her skin like a prayer he's trying to make true by repetition. Her hands are flat on his chest, and she can feel his heart going too fast, and she wants to believe him.

She closes her eyes and pretends she doesn't see the fear in his.

The water soaks her lashes. She whispers, so quietly the steam almost eats it: "Kane. When did you start lying to me by silence?"

He doesn't answer. He only holds her tighter, like he's trying to fold her into his bones, like there's a deadline on how long he gets to keep her, and he knows something she doesn't.

"Kane." She says it again, and her voice cracks on the second syllable, which makes her furious. "Just tell me one thing. Are we going to be okay?"

He is silent for a beat too long. Then he presses his mouth to her hair and says, "Yes. You're going to be okay. That's the only thing that matters, and I'll burn this whole city down to make sure of it."

It should sound like a love letter. It sounds, to her, in the steam, like a goodbye dressed up as a promise. She tells herself she misheard. She's very good at that, by then.